Let’s not beat around the bush: Saints Row is creatively bankrupt. The latest in a long list of Grand Theft Auto imitators, this clone replicates Rockstar’s controversial games so closely that the uneducated eye could mistake it for the real deal. But unlike past rip-offs, Saints Row is actually a…
Lewis Black: Red, White & Screwed(HBO) Like many other Daily Show success stories, Lewis Black is a comedian made for these times; his facial contortions and verbal tics are expressions of the Bush-era phrase “outrage overload.” But unlike other big names in political stand-up right now (David Cross, Bill Maher),…
Avenger (Warner Bros.) Calvaire: The Ordeal (Palm) Cedric the Entertainer: Taking You Higher (HBO) Changing Times (Koch Lorber) Confidence (Lionsgate) Deadfall (Lionsgate) Edmond (First Independent) The Greatest American Hero: The Complete Series (Anchor Bay) Harvey Toons: The Complete Collection (Sony Wonder) Humphrey Bogart: The Signature Collection, Volumes 1 & 2…
Herd your posse of ragtag cowboys and Indians into the minivan for three days of Old West fun. Starting today and continuing through Sunday, the quickest guns in the land will be competing at Cripple Creek’s National World Fast-Draw Competition as part of the town’s Frontier & Chuckwagon Daze, which…
John Erhardt, the founder of Drinking Liberally Denver, has a message for all the left-wingers out there: “To people who have maybe heard of Drinking Liberally but have never been to an event, this would be the event not to be missed.” This event is the second annual Drinking Liberally…
Go ahead: Risk the thirty-minute drive today and you’ll find yourself savoring autumn on the Front Range during the Mountain Area Land Trust Watershed Trail Festival, happening from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. along the scenic Beaver Brook Watershed, which is located 3.5 miles west of Evergreen on state highway…
The Greatest Show on Earth withstood the Great Depression; it persevered through two turns of the centuries; it even gave harried moms something to yell at their children: “I am not running a three-ring circus here!” But can it survive modern audiences who crave the high-tech appeal of Cirque du…
“My mom always makes comments about how shy I was when I was young, and she just can’t believe that I’m doing what I’m doing,” says Burlesque As It Was founder and dancer Vivienne VaVoom — aka Michelle Baldwin, a Westword contributor. “It’s changed the way I dress, the way…
Front-loaded with family discord, terminal cancer, prodigal jailbait, a cute kiddie looking for love, and other accessories of the ready-to-wear soap opera, Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is as heartfelt, sincere and soggy with nostalgia as some of his other periodic homages to the virtues of peasant…
There’s something comic — and a little spooky — about the sight of Kevin Costner in rubber flippers and a diving mask. Granted, it’s been more than a decade since the $180 million fiasco of Waterworld, but you’d think that an older, wiser, fleshier Costner would hesitate before so much…
A variant of what military leaders call “the fog of war” shrouds much of The Blood of My Brother, Andrew Berends’s unsettling and uncensored documentary about the effects of the American occupation in Iraq. In the film’s first scene, we behold a black-clad middle-aged Iraqi woman and her nineteen-year-old son…
Sweet, crazy and tinged with sadness, The Science of Sleep is a wondrous concoction. The tricksy romantic narrative — in which Gael García Bernal plays a hapless, Chaplinesque madman — may be reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Michel Gondry directed from Charlie Kaufman’s script. The look,…
Self-conscious aesthete, existential structuralist, one of the world’s most eloquent conjoiners of metaphysical mystery and sociopolitical critique, and a still-missed fallen soldier in the shrinking ranks of Euro art film, Krzysztof Kieslowski was only a well-known global figure for about six years before he died — beginning in 1989 with…
One would never confuse the work of writer-director Todd Phillips with that of the late Robert Hamer, whose filmography includes the essential Kind Hearts and Coronets. Hamer’s movies had a gentlemanly quality, no matter the cruelty that skulked beneath their prim exteriors; one always felt the characters in his movies,…
There’s one thing you can always expect from the Singer Gallery in the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture: high-quality art exhibits with some kind of intellectual content. So it’s no surprise that EUGENE YELCHIN: A Thousand Casualties, a solo featuring expressionist abstractions based on Old Master paintings, is one…
The funky little Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) is the city’s oldest art co-op, which may be why it frequently hosts great pairs of solos. Currently, Edge is home to a couple of sophisticated shows dedicated to contemporary abstraction, with Jennifer Hope: 4 new paintings installed in the front…
Emilio Lobato and Martha Daniels. The solos that open the season at William Havu Gallery combine the disparate work of two of the area’s best-known and well-regarded artists. On the walls is Emilio Lobato: Desde Siempre (Since Forever), which comprises the artist’s signature abstractions. The title refers to Lobato’s self-exploration…
The year is 1942, and England is at war. A revered but aging actor, identified only as Sir, is traveling the country, bringing Shakespeare to the provinces. Given the chaos of the times and the fact that most able-bodied Englishmen are fighting overseas, his is a depleted and ragtag company,…
Shadow Theatre Company’s latest offering, Plenty of Time, is sweet, smart and a lot of fun. Like Bernard Slade’s Same Time Next Year — which author John She’vin Foster admits as an influence — it chronicles a love affair in which the partners meet every year over an extended period…
I Am My Own Wife. The subject of I Am My Own Wife is German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berfelde in 1928 Berlin, a collector of antiques who survived both World War II and the Communist years in East Germany. But the play is as much about author…
Football is a game of inches. The same goes for the Madden series. Each fall, a new Madden game arrives, with a roster update and an incremental change in the game-play formula. Last year brought a “cone of vision” for the quarterback, which mostly just annoyed the fans. Madden NFL…
The Big Animal (Milestone) It’s a simple yet lesser known law of comedy: Camels are always funny. There are the jaws that drool and chew side to side, the front legs that move like a human’s, the humps — but mostly it’s the eyes: There’s something of Buddha in a…
